4 Digital Marketing Trends for 2018

17 Nov, 2017

1. Social Media Advertising

With increased competition and changes to Facebook’s algorithms, you can no longer rely solely on organic social media posts. You’ll need to invest a portion of your marketing budget for social media advertising, to gain traction on top of your competitors.

Using boosted posts or social media advertising, you’ll target your audience more specifically and avoid your good content going to waste. Social media marketing is an extremely cost-effective way to reach a targeted group of consumers, so if you don’t plan on having or increasing your social advertising budget in 2018, consider yourself already behind your competitors.

2. Video Marketing

In 2018, video marketing must be an important part of your content strategy. Videos are retained by customers much more than plain text, and it is estimated that by 2019, video will make up 80% of internet traffic. All this interactive video content can feed into improving your SEO strategy by optimising all these files for searchers too.

Drone footage will be increasingly popular due to the unlimited camera angles, fast turnaround and ability to capture locations that are normally unreachable. The demand for video production and drone footage will continue to grow, as the internet demands more interactive content.
3. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still relatively new, but the next 18 months will see it grow even further. AI will help shape more interactive content that can help bring visitors to your website. It is time for more B2B brands to start exploring the benefits of AI, and how it can help marketing, sales and customer support. You may already be using basic forms of AI, such as email personalisation, marketing automation or chat bots.

4. Personalisation

Personalisation in marketing has been trending for years, although it continues to become increasingly important. Recent research shows that customers will walk if brand experiences are not personalised. This is even more prevalent in the B2B world, where B2B buyers show higher expectations for personalisation than B2C consumers.
Personalisation requires your database information to be highly accurate, or your personalisation attempts will do more harm than good. Marketing activities can take more time to execute, however if you reach the right person, at the right time, at the right place, with the right message – then your efforts will not be wasted.

Digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving. To remain constant, businesses need to continuously stay on top of emerging trends in the industry. By doing so, you’ll stay ahead of the competition, raise brand awareness, drive traffic to your website and overall bring leads to your business.